We recently made a cool addition the Team Game Finder in the Pro Football Reference Play Index. You can now customize your game searches to isolate (or exclude) games played immediately after bye weeks.

Since the bye week was instituted in 1990, the Eagles and Broncos have the NFL's best records coming out of the bye (21-6 each). They've had 27 games in 26 seasons with a bye because in 1993, every team had two bye weeks. The link also shows that, since 1990, teams coming off their bye week have a 429-394-3 record, which is over .500, but perhaps not as strong as you might expect. Home records in general seem to be nearly identical to home records for teams coming off of byes, but the bye week really seems to help road teams. Through 2016 Week 4, road teams have a .421 win percentage since 1990. However, over that same span, road teams coming off of their bye week have a .461 win percentage.

You can add the "bye week" criteria to your searches by utilizing the "miscellaneous criteria" section of the search form.

We hope you enjoy this addition. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

We have made an addition to the Baseball Reference Draft Section. There is a new column of data in the table labeled "Signed." A "Y" indicates that the player was signed after that draft, while an "N" indicates that he did not.

This week is one of those good news/bad news situations. On the one had, we're just a few days away from the start of the MLB Postseason! But, on the other hand, the regular season finishes up this Sunday. With another year in the books, we wanted to break down the main contenders for MLB's most important awards. Unfortunately, Tim Tebow will have to wait till next year to get his shot at a trophy, but there are a lot of worthy players who've had excellent years. Let's take a look: Read the rest of this entry

We're continuing to add features to our newly redesigned sites, and we have a very exciting one to share with you today, especially for those of you who have your own website.

Previously, we've had tools that give you the option to embed tables like standings and leaderboards on your website. That option is still around, but we've improved on it. If you hover over "Share & More", the second option you'll see is "Embed This Table." Read the rest of this entry

We wanted to briefly share an enhancement made to the Pro Football Reference Play Index. We have added a "Career Game Number" field to the search form for the Player Game Finder. This new search field allows users to customize their searches for certain periods of a player's career. Please note that this tool can be used back to the 1970 NFL-AFL Merger, but can't be used for 1960-69, even though those seasons are covered by other Player Game Finder tools. Here are a few examples of how this new feature can be used:

• Since the merger, Cam Newton is the only player to throw for 400+ yards in his NFL debut
• Eric Dickerson's 645 yards are the most rushing yards by any player in their first five career games since the merger.
• Randy Moss caught 17 TDs in his first 16 career games, which is the most by any player since 1970.
• Charles Woodson has the most career interceptions after already appearing in 200 career games.

We hope you enjoy this addition. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback.

In 1950, the Brooklyn Dodgers finished 2 games out of first place in the National League, behind a .400-OBP, 7-WAR season from Jackie Robinson, three players cracking 30 Home Runs (Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, and Duke Snider), and plenty of pitching from workhorses Don Newcombe and Preacher Roe. Looking on from the broadcast booth was a 22-year-old who had been hired by Red Barber to supplement the team's radio and television broadcast team. Read the rest of this entry

If you're an avid user of Pro Football Reference or Basketball Reference, you might be familiar with the Player Comparison tool in the Play Index. We're happy to announce that this popular tool has now been added to the Hockey Reference Play Index, as well.

With the Player Comparison Finder, you can choose anywhere from 2-6 players and compare single seasons, a selection of seasons, or their entire careers.

For instance, you can easily compare the rookie seasons of Alex Ovechkin and Mario Lemieux. Or you can compare their age-20 seasons. You can also compare spans of seasons. For instance, here's Wayne Gretzky's 1st 5 NHL seasons vs Lemieux's 1st 5 seasons.

You can also choose to compare entire careers. And, remember, you can select up to 6 players at a time:

We've reached what's perhaps the most fun sports week of the year, at least from a narrative perspective. That's right, it's the week after the start of the NFL season! With a small amount of information to go by, in a sport that can see wide variance in game-to-game performances, football fans, writers, and even coaches across the nation have no choice but to jump to wild conclusions, many of which are doomed to look foolish just weeks later. Read the rest of this entry

One of the things I pride myself on at Sports Reference is that our sites are fast and not annoying. We want to connect you with the data you want, as quickly as possible, every single time. We spend a lot of time trying to make this happen.

We have another important goal with our site, which is to make money. We have seven full-time employees maintaining our sites on a daily basis, so if we don't generate a significant amount of revenue, things will start to go south for us reasonably quickly. We spend a lot of time thinking about that as well, and for a small-to-medium-sized publisher like us, that means running advertisements on our site.

Unfortunately, sometimes the ads that come through our site cause serious problems for users. This is a constant source of frustration for us, so I wanted to take this moment to explain how this happens. I realize we are 100% responsible for what we put on our pages, and so any ad that is served on our page is ultimately our responsibility and the fault lies with us for any negative impacts from an ad.
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It's going to be almost 90 degrees this weekend and the leaves haven't started changing color at all, so that can only mean one thing: football season is here! When we left off last season, an ascendant Carolina Panthers team struggled in Cam Newton's first Super Bowl against Von Miller and the Denver Broncos. And when we picked up this season, not too much had changed. With Game One in the books and an exciting slate of football ahead this Sunday, let's dig into some of this season's biggest questions.

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